The New York Times, June 12, 1977

By FRANK KERMODE

Many people now believe that Wallace Stevens is the greatest American poet of the 20th century. At the time of his death in 1955 it was the received opinion that his first volume, "Harmonium," was his best, and that--for Stevens was writing almost to end of his life--produced verse that was by comparison rather dismal and self-indulgent. But by now it seems clear that Stevens continually developed, and reached his full power in his 60's.

All this later poetry is difficult and calls for commentary; but I have sometimes thought that the attempts of the professional interpreters to impose their high valuation of it upon a larger public was likely to produce an effect opposite to that intended. The assumption that this philosophical- sounding body of poetry must have inside it a truly philosophical skeleton has indeed proved disastrous to crude anatomists; and although there now exists a whole shelf of books, only a very few contain good or even tolerable criticism of Stevens. One of these, Helen Vendler's commentary on the longer poems, is frequently cited by Harold Bloom. It is certainly a good book, but as certainly not definitive--in the only sense in which that word can be applied to criticism, that of providing the matrix for a generation of comment.

Such are the known powers and ambition of Mr. Bloom that one was aware before even opening this large book that he would aim at nothing less than the definitive. He is a very remarkable critic, with the energy to be as ruthlessly acquisitive of learning as a good critic must be, and to maintain what must surely be the highest rate of interpretive output in the world of scholarship. He has also a great, almost selfish passion for poetry, and he interprets difficult texts as if there were no more important activity in the world, which may be right. Since he has also been long devoted to Stevens there is, a priori, cause to believe that he may well be the man to produce that definitive commentary.

After reading the book I have some reservations about this. But Bloom's interpretations and judgments of Stevens, extricated from their sometimes obnoxious packaging, nearly always strike me as right, and as having their own exactness. He is right to say that "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," "Auroras of Autumn" and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" are the great central poems, and he understands as few have understood the peculiar majesty of the very late poetry. Even on "Harmonium," which he writes down, he seems just and perceptive.

Of course there will be disagreements on detail; for example, he surprisingly overrates "The Idea of Order at Key West," a poem he is particularly well-equipped to fault if he chooses. Now and again his excitement causes him to take his eye off the text: in his commentary on "Ordinary Evening xxix," he misses the linguistic joke on which the whole beautiful fable turns. The mariners who come from the land of elm trees are disappointed with the land of the lemon trees because they see them only as a variant of elms:

We are back once more in the land of the elm trees,
But folded over, turned round.

The word "elm" is the word "lemon" folded over and turned round, and this simple origin should be noted before one goes on to the "fiction of the self" and the complexities of Stevens's meditation on change. Some failures seem simply perverse, like the meanly literalistic reading of "cold copulars" in the exquisite lines.

Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace,
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

But in so extensive a commentary there are bound to be claims one cannot accept. Nor does Bloom want total agreement. When, in the most endearing pages of the book, he argues "madly and minutely" for his interpretation of the Canon Aspirin passage in "Notes," he remarks that he is trying to offer "a strong misreading" (the technical sense of that remark would have to be expounded from his other books) and very splendid, as such, it is.

The achievements of this book are many. First, the interpretations of many poems are likely to be our points of departure in the immediate future. This applies to the poems already named, and also to "The Comedian as the Letter C," "Credences of Summer," "The Owl in the Sarcophagus," "The Rock" and a dozen others, including "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" (though Stevens wrote "monument of cat" not "moment of cat," which is a "strong misreading" of a kind Bloom hasn't hitherto gone in for).

Next, Bloom's placing of Stevens in relation to his great predecessors, especially Emerson and Whitman, is extremely authoritative. Emerson emerges from this book as what Bloom calls a "strong poet," and a mysterious one. His connection with Stevens is indicated by curiously definite traces in the later poet's work--in the central concept of "poverty," in Stevens's "hero," in his "scholar" or "rabbi," in his symbolic candle. Even the MacCullough of "Notes I. viii" is out of Emerson (though Emerson called him not "MacCullough," as Bloom implies, but "Macdonald"). Stevens's relation of deviance to Whitman is also very positively accounted for; and only less convincing are the mappings of his relationships with the primary English Romantics.

So with this much to be said in favor of the book, why hesitate to grant it the high status to which it manifestly aspires? First, because although Bloom always knows what he is saying (his is not the fashionable obscurity that conceals an inability to work out one's own sense) he does put horrible and ugly obstacles in the way of civilized non-coterie readers. These, like the book's unnecessary length, its libertine discursiveness and allusiveness, are partly a way of emphasizing the commentator's presence and his benign interpretive violence. Bloom is blessedly free of the spite and rancor that we find in many contemporary critics; he treats other commentators with much amenity, but they are always his audience, and his object is to stress the extent of his originality.

A key word in his vocabulary is "belatedness." The secret of the relation between "strong poets" is that one has the misfortune to come after the other, and the belated must seem to establish his own priority. "What is pleasure for a strong poet, ultimately," asks Bloom in a very revealing sentence, "if it is not the pleasure of priority in one's own invention?" Now an interpreter is always "belated" in respect of his text, and in respect of precedent critics; and Bloom's consciousness of this double belatedness makes him a self-conscious seeker of "priority" and what he calls clinamen, the necessary swerve away from one's antecedents.

He achieves it by ingenious bricolage, cobbling together overlapping "systems" from philosophical, rhetorical, psychoanalytical and Kabbalistic odds and ends. These he has expounded at length in other books; they map his response to individual poems and poets, and indeed to the whole history of poetry. Here they are used with local glosses but rarely with fuller explanation; one really needs to have read the other books before starting this one, as one will have to absorb the difficult theoretical coda of this book before tackling the next. All this tends to limit the readership to whom this book will be useful; it consists of those who not only know Stevens very well, but are also well versed in Bloom.

A glossary might have helped: aporia, belated, clinamen, crisis, crossing, kenosis, metalepsis, Nachträglichkeit, tessera would be a few of its words. Some of these terms are used in senses not identical with those understood by the specialists from whom they are borrowed; a theologian will guess what Bloom means by kenosis, perhaps, but most readers will be troubled. His idiosyncratic use of etymologies doesn't help; it is a way of helping on a strong misreading by claiming, if necessary, that a word retains the sense of its Indo- Germanic root.

It is usually possible to translate even the toughest passages; but that does not make them less hideous. And there are many pages of commentary in which the author is content with the poverty of ordinary language, forgets all the doctrines and the jargons, and conveys much better the emotional depth and intelligence of his reading. I suppose we may think of the system as we do of Yeats's. Yeats got from his "metaphors for poetry"; Bloom gets from his tropes for criticism. We may wish it were not so; but that is the way he works. And now the time has come to answer the question, Who is Stevens's best commentator? And the answer seems to be, "Harold Bloom, alas!"

Frank Kermode is the author of "The Sense of an Ending," "D. H. Lawrence," "The Classic," "English Renaissance Literature" and other books.